MBA1676 What Your Marketing Focus Should Be in December

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Hey oh welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Because every day is a chance for you to level up your business with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online over at100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn what your marketing focus should be in December. For many businesses online and offline, December can be a slow month because of the holidays. So especially if you're in the B2B world serving other businesses. If you're in retail where you're selling gifts to people for the holidays, that's a different story. But if you're in a slow time right now, which is the truth for many businesses, then spending money on paid marketing like Facebook ads may not be the best use of your resources during a slow month. So what should you focus on? Well, whatever you do now is really going to affect how you perform in the early stages of 2021 that first. So we're going to make some significant investments to make sure we have more traffic, more leads in our business in the first quarter of next year. How? Well, that's what today's episode is all about. So let's get into it let's get down to business. In my experience, when it comes to online businesses or even driving traffic to your offline business's website, the best return on investment you can get is through content marketing. It's providing great content to your audience to attract that audience to turn them into leads and into sales eventually. So this means first and foremost, your blog. Because your blog is a great way for you to gain organic traffic via search engine optimization. This could be your podcast, it could be a YouTube channel that you're working on. The point here is that your content marketing is super important when it comes to attracting your the perfect leads, the perfect people that fit your product, that fit your service. And we're going to use December to focus on improving it. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to audit and then we're going to improve. In this month, you're going to take the time to take a look at which blog posts on your site are really converting, which ones are getting the most traffic, which ones are leading to opt ins and people to give their name and email address in your email forms, and which ones are not. You might find that your blog really performs off five blog posts and the rest really don't really move the needle. If that's the case, which is the case for many businesses, we're going to use that data, we're going to use that information. First thing we're going to do is we're going to study and find out what makes these five blog posts different. Are they longer? Are they more detailed? Do they have multimedia? What are the topics? What are the pain points? The reason why we want to know what they have in common, why are they similar? What is different about them versus the ones that we're not performing is because we want to double and triple down on those types of posts. We want to plan our posts for the next year and even maybe publish a new post this month that will do the same things. That is going to work. A lot of us, we don't analyze what works so we can continue to do it, so we can triple down on it. So let's do that. Okay? Let's analyze what's different about it and do the same thing. Okay. The next thing is the ones that are not working. There's nothing wrong with you unpublishing those posts with deleting those posts. Okay?

Why?

Because your SEO will actually do better. Your site will actually have more traction on search engines. If all your posts are powerful, where the ratio of powerful posts or high traffic posts versus low traffic posts is high. Okay, so say for example, Your blog has 100 blog posts and only five of them are amazing, okay, that are really driving major traffic. So you have a 5 to 95 ratio, right? Let's say you cut down your posts to 30 instead of 100. You cut the ones that are not performing that well and now you have 5 versus 25. That ratio is going to give you more SEO juice. So by cutting the posts that don't work, it's going to help your overall site health if you're having a hard time killing your darlings. One thing that we've done in the past that really works is combine posts, take 4, 5, 6 blog posts and make it into an epic post. One post that is going to provide all that information into one post. Consolidate, basically. Next, get a keyword ranking tool like ahrefs. It's like $99 a month. It's definitely worth it because you can take a look at the market leaders in your market, right? What keywords are they really scoring big with? Are they ranking very high on Google? So that way you can be competitive. Find out what those keywords are and write blog post because obviously they're getting a lot of traffic because people are searching for those keywords. And this leads me to planning your content schedule. This is a good chance now to have some time to plan out what are you going to write about in your blog? What podcast episodes are you going to publish? What videos on YouTube are you going to publish for the next year, even if it means publishing one blog post or video a month? What are those 12 topics? Let's do the homework now so we can just execute come 2021. The audit alone and consolidating your post and really focusing on what works will boost your content marketing strategy and your SEO in a big way. Trust me, I've done it several times and it works. And you have to keep doing this. It's not a once and done thing. We're due for another audit, so we're going to be doing this soon. Can you enrich your current blog posts with more multimedia? Google has stated that blog posts that have more multimedia images, gifs, animations, video, this is an easy thing you can do. Go to unsplash.com, go to jiffy.com and go ahead and take some time and populate your posts with some multimedia. Take a look at your SEO. If you're on WordPress, you should be using Yoast. Yoast is a great plugin for you to be able to optimize for your keywords by putting the metadata, making sure your SEO is actually working. Working. Make sure all your metadata for all your blog posts are populated. Let's talk about your leads and your opt ins and what's called your content upgrades or your freemiums, right? The things that you give away in exchange for name and email address. Many of us, we will have three, four, five different ones on our sites. Pop ups and all kinds of things. They're not all created equal. Take a look at your CRM, take a look at your email marketing tool. Which list, which freebie is working the best? Okay. Cut them as much as possible and get laser focused on what works. We did this at the hundred dollar MBA. If you go to 1,000mba net we cut out all our opt ins except for one brand new one which is called our breakout business roadmap, which is something that we created because, you know, it's exactly what people want. This is actually what people want and this is what they're willing to, you know, sign up for. A step by step guide on what are the things they need to do and in what order to build a great business. And everywhere on our site we're going to be referring to this opt in. One call to action. We experimented for a bit and realized that a lot of these opt ins are confusing. They don't all perform at the same level. Some of them are dormant. So it's a good time to clean up your site with all these opt inside. Content marketing and email marketing go hand in hand. So a quick tip, go ahead and check out your email marketing list and see how healthy it is. What are your open rates, what are your click rates? All these things. One of the things that we've done recently again at the $100 MBA is we started to ask for double opt in. Double opt in meaning that when somebody you know, puts their name, email address to get a freemium or to get a opt in or get a, you know, a content upgrade, they don't just get it immediately and they don't get just added to the email list immediately. They have to first confirm, go to their inbox, say yes, I want to get emails from the 100 LBA and then they get it. Why do we do this? Because this is best practice number two. It tells the email servers that we're not a spammy company and people actually click and respond to our emails and it forces people to put it in the primary inbox, not promo. So explore doing double opt in. This is when we're going to clean up shop December. We're going to make sure that in 2021 our business is getting free targeted traffic through content marketing and we know how to serve them once they opt in.

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Once you've nailed the blog post on your site that you want to be using on your site, go ahead and do another review. See if you can update the post and you can say it's updated. Republish it with a new date, add new information Add updated information. Check that all your links are working that are on the post. Sometimes we write something a year ago and a lot of things are not working anymore. Breathe new life to these blog posts that have served you so well so they can get re energized. And if you have time and resources this month, I highly recommend that you write a blog post and have it scheduled to publish at the start of the year. This will get your year going strong with great content. People are motivated at the start of the year and Google prioritizes recent posts sometimes, especially when it comes to a post with a date like five productivity hacks for 2021 there have it guys. You don't need to spend any money in a down time if your business is slow during December. If it's a rush time, obviously it's going to slow down after Christmas. You can focus on this stuff on the last week of December. If it's a busy time, then you can focus on these strategies after Christmas. You know the last week of December. Content marketing is a long tail, sustainable way for you to get consistent, valuable traffic so every minute. Every dollar you put into it, you're gonna get back. It's a great investment. It's one of the best things we've done in our businesses. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Make sure you share this podcast. Go ahead and do that right now. Share it on social, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever. Let them know what you love about the $100 MBA show and Share the link to it on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go on, I'll leave you with this. Content marketing is not about quantity, it's about quality. We learned this about a few years ago in webinar and we changed our strategy and our number one traffic source is Google Search. Because of this, instead of trying to, you know, publish a brand new blog post every week, we took the Brian deans model from backlinko.com and publish an epic post every six weeks. Go ahead and check out our blog@webinarninja.com and you'll see what I'm talking about. Or just go to Google and search. Best time for a webinar or webinar guide and you'll see what I mean when you see the rankings. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you in tomorrow's episode. Free Riot Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

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